*promote space travel in any form

I've tried to make the argument that aliens couldn't have possibly crashed on Earth, and that the whole idea is insane. So advanced aliens managed to acquire sufficient expertise at space travel to actually cross the unimaginably vast gulfs between stars, but they haven't figured out how planets and gravity work?

Maybe I should just give UFO believers copies of Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" and tell them I'm willing to discuss after they read it.

music for space travel...

On one hand it does perhaps lack imagination, but on the other it makes perfect sense that aliens we first find would be much like us since they'd be attracted by our radio waves, and to become a space traveling civilisation they'd likely have similar motivations and their brains/reasoning capabilities would have evolved in a similar way. Afterall the human brain seems to be hardwired to find other humans - we see faces in the clouds and random floor patterns etc.

That new movie Arrival (2016) (not the Charlie Sheen 90s one) did a great job of unique aliens.

I guess another reason why fiction makes aliens like us is so that it allows a story to be told without the story getting bogged down on the details (unless that is the focus of the story).

One could argue, for example, that we already all drive electric cars because they all need a battery to start, if one was in a hot tub with Elon.

Fortunately, as far as creation myths go, we know from South Park that the Mormons got it right. And South Park is definitely more important than electric cars and space travel.

People admire you, Elon, dont use the opportunity to f*ck up their minds too much with sci-fi hot tub thought experiments! Be responsible!

When they say in the news on TV that the sun will be shining today, they dont go on to tell people what its going to do in the future or what the alternatives are.

I'm confused. They imply a 3 day trip to mars is possible, but is that at the maximum speed photonic propulsion can deliver, or do they include the acceleration and deceleration times? As I understood it, photonic propulsion can deliver extreme speeds, but only at a minimal acceleration. That means that maximum speed is much faster, but accelerating to that speed takes immensely longer, and the same goes for deceleration. Maybe they've invented a new method I've not heard of with much higher acceleration, but that's not really mentioned in the video.
They actually seem to imply they plan to use the same tech as cyclotrons, which means essentially a huge rail gun (and that's not photonic propulsion BTW, it's magnetic). Again, the amount of propulsion is miniscule, but the top speed is high with that method. Yes, you can expel matter at near speed of light, but only in tiny amounts and using huge amounts of energy.
Yes, it may take 10 minutes to achieve 30% the speed of light....with single molecules or atoms.
There are MANY reasons why we can't do this at macro sizes. Just look at the size of a cyclotron needed to accelerate an atom to those relativistic speeds. Now think about sizing that up to accelerate enough matter to move a spaceship instead of a single atom and it's likely near the size of the entire planet. We won't be building a cyclotron that size ever, nor will we likely ever shrink the accelerators to a size where they can fit inside a spaceship to shoot trillions of atoms out like a light speed gun. They are just too big and use too much power. Maybe once fusion is perfected and miniaturization also perfected it could work for interstellar travel, but never for local space travel, the acceleration levels are just too small.
Also, it seems solar sails give the same or better acceleration to the same top speeds without the impossible technology....but they don't work too well for stopping except at other stars.

Really gets the imagination going for the possibilities of the future. Civilian space travel in our lifetime?

esoog, ever read rendezvous with rama? Great series of books that deal with humans and interstellar travel much like this (although no gravity/wormhole travel). A simular situation happens there so it was not unfamiliar territory to me. Space travel is simply not friendly if you try to anchor yourself in a certain time and place.

The first Mass Effect game had a fantastic writeup on combat in space, and why it was supposed to be a more anti-hollywood, incredibly boring event in that universe.
Most encounters could be resolved in seconds from hundreds of thousands of kilometers (well outside visual range), and it only took a single shot to end the encounter, either through instantly disabling critical systems, or overheating the heatsinks onboard (which were constantly venting excess cosmic and solar radiation as it was), causing any sort of energy shielding to be impractical for similar reasons.
Nearly all military encounters in space were ultimately stalemates, because things could be resolved so immediately and with such deadly finality, it forced the space-faring civilizations to ask questions first and shoot as a last resort. I can't remember the exact description, but essentially a "fight" in space was two or more opposing ships simply showing up and sitting around doing nothing until the situation resolved itself, or one side had clearly more guns than the other (but there may have even been reasons for why the latter result wasn't common either, but it's been so long I can't recall).
Regardless, I love that vision of space travel and hypothetical military maneuvers because it portrayed the reality of such events from a really hardcore scientific approach. Obviously the rest of the writing team was unable to work around those limitations, since the rest of that game and the rest of the series pretty much resorted back to the Star Wars formula almost immediately. I wish their writers had been as talented as the guy who constructed the universe and it's laws, because it was an amazingly refreshing take on sci-fi space travel.

I didn't interpret it that way based on the 1,3 seconds of the trailer...
I'm no astrophysicist but space-bending does seem to be the most plausible way for interstellar space-travel at this time.

Jesus Christ that actually looks right up my fucking alley. I Love destroyed futures and space travel!

I thought it was the big intergalatic spatula that space-traveled across the cosmos to flatten solar systems into flat planetary buns. Gee was I wrong.

In case you're wondering (like me) what this movie is about:

A group of explorers make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage. (imdb)